Item: IBM Cognos Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Martin Rivera

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My organization is a consulting firm, and an IBM Premier Partner. My business unit specializes in the resale and implementation of IBM Business Analytics products, solutions and services to our clientele.

Pros and Cons

Pros

IBM Cognos integrates a multitude of data sources across an enterprise into a single, manageable reporting and analytics environment.
IBM Cognos integrates with and leverages enterprise directory systems to enable data, and object security within the reporting envrionment.
IBM Cognos provides implementation and deployment options that support scalability to grow with your enterprise.

Cons

While vast improvements have been made in recent releases, IBM Cognos still lags behind some of its competitors in the area of mobile.
As with many other enterprise-scale software suites,, IBM Cognos' many moving parts and integration pieces result in some unintended functionality and feature flaws from time to time.

Return on Investment

IBM's standing in the Business Analytics market place makes for a great bridge to position our products and offerings to our clientele.
The low footprint deployment (from the consumer's perspective) allows for organization to grow and scale their application and deployemnts relatively painlessly, and cost-effectively.

Alternatives Considered

I myself have been exposed to Microstrategy, Business Objects, and Microsoft BI. While I do find strenghts in all of these tools, one area I do believe that IBM Cognos has distinct advantages when deployed in an environment where integration with other IBM products (AIX, DB2, WebSphere App Server , for example) are in play.

Likelihood to Renew

IBM's current investment in IBM Cognos Business Analytics tools are in the process of taking the product suite from already being a leader in the market place, to truly standing out in the cutting edge of the Business Analytics platform arena. The last 2 or 3 releases alone have shown staggering improvements in the areas of visualizations, mobile capabilities, and customization. The future for IBM Cognos is surely to be a positive one, given the direction that IBM is taking its product suite, and I certainly look forward to being a part of it.

Likelihood to Recommend

For security-dependent business analytics solutions that require integration with differing data sources across an enterprise, and that will be deployed to a variety of consumers, with different roles, analytic consumption needs and methods, IBM Cognos should most certainly be in the top contenders.

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IBM Cognos Business Intelligence - a market leader that's only getting stronger

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